Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

by Gerald Murnane

  I can put this point another way. For most of my time as a writer of fiction, I have wanted not to have my reader take my writing as an account of a world whose existence the reader and I might agree on. I can put this point still another way. The aim of most of my fiction is not that the reader should sympathise with any character or share the feelings of any character, much less believe in the reality of any character. No, the aim of most of my fiction is that the reader should believe in the reality of the narrator of the fiction.

  I often told my students that a writer of my sort of fiction is a technical writer. The task of this sort of writer is to report in the plainest language the images that most claim his attention from among the images in his mind and then to arrange his sentences and paragraphs (and, if applicable, his chapters) so as to suggest the connections between those images. This may seem to a gathering of scholars a niggardly account of how I came to write books of fiction that provide you with such a field of enquiry. For me to say that I wrote what I wrote simply by describing some of the contents of my mind – is this too easy a way out for me?

  Perhaps I should do for you people here today what I often did for my classes in Introductory Fiction Writing. I used to tell each of those classes, in about my fifth session with them and a few weeks before their first fiction assignment was due, that a person paid to teach others a skill ought to be able to exercise that skill in front of the others and to give a full and clear account of the exercising. Then I used to do in front of the class something that few teachers of fiction-writing can have done in a classroom. Sometimes by writing key words on the whiteboard, and sometimes by miming with my hand in the air the writing of sentences that I spoke at the same time aloud, I tried to show my students how I would have begun an as-yet-unwritten piece of short fiction.

  I used to crib just a bit in my demonstrations of fiction-writing, but I explained to my students that I was cribbing and why. Most of my pieces of short fiction have begun with a single image: sometimes a simple image, sometimes a detailed image. The image would have appeared to me many a time before I understood that it would later be the source of a piece of fiction. The image would have bothered me, perhaps, or pleaded with me, or simply stared at me for days or even months before I noted its details and filed my note in my file for such notes. My cribbing in front of my classes consisted in my beginning my demonstration with an image the details of which had previously been filed in the file just mentioned. I could never have begun to write a piece of fiction at my own desk, let alone in the sometimes uneasy atmosphere of a writing class, unless I was working with an image that I could trust.

  If I were to try in front of you people today to write in the air the beginnings of a piece of short fiction, I would begin by reporting in a sentence or two certain details from the image that I recalled this morning when I was trying to recall images the details of which I have noted during recent years in the file mentioned earlier. I would report details that might seem banal or trivial to you people, although I would assure you of my confidence that those details were full of meaning for me. Why else, I would ask you rhetorically, would the image and all its details have stayed in my mind for year after year when so many other images had disappeared? In short, I would write in the air between you and myself one or two sentences reporting that a hen crouched on the ground in an unkempt front garden of a house of red bricks on a certain afternoon of the fifth decade of the twentieth century when the sky was filled with close-packed and fast-moving grey and black clouds and when the same wind that drove the clouds across the sky ruffled tufts of feathers on the crouching hen.

  I would report much more of this single image. I would report that a male child who happened to notice the hen from the rear seat of a motor car while it drove out of the unkempt garden and who wondered why the hen was crouching when it might have been foraging noticed in an instant before the car turned out of the garden and northwards towards a place called Kinglake, where he had never yet been and about which he had often speculated, that the wind had ruffled in the same instant not only the hackles of the hen, which were of a rich, copper-orange colour, but a few of the under-feathers, which were of a glossy black colour, and that the ruffling of the under-feathers had caused to be exposed to the wind the head of a chicken, only a few days old and of a pale, creamy colour.

  I would then pause in my reporting and would assure you that I was not, most emphatically not, writing a sort of autobiography while I was reporting the details of the hen and the ruffled feathers, even though I myself happened to have lived in a house of red bricks during a few years of the decade mentioned earlier and even though my father happened to have won so much money on Dark Felt in the Melbourne Cup of 1943 that he bought a huge brown Nash sedan and took his wife and children for Sunday drives for several months until he had to sell the Nash sedan to settle his latest debts with his bookmakers. If I were writing a sort of autobiography, I would say to you good people, I would be reporting the sort of detail just mentioned. I would be reporting my memories of the summer of 1943–44, when my father took me and my two brothers and my mother for a drive every Sunday. I would be reporting conversations, shaping anecdotes, trying to suggest motives…

  I would go on with my reporting of details of images. I would report that the noise of the car caused the hen to rise to its feet, enabling the male child in the back seat to notice that the cream-coloured chicken was the only chicken of the black hen with the copper-orange hackles and causing the child to wonder why his father, who owned the hen and the chicken and many other hens and chickens and roosters, had not dashed the head of the chicken against a post as he had dashed the heads of a number of other chickens in the past when he had not wanted to have the mothers of the chickens looking after only one or two or even of a handful of chickens when she might have rejoined the flock of hens that laid eggs daily.

  I would report a few details of a few more images. In the meanwhile I would remind you that my noting the details of image after image was not at all what is sometimes called free association. I would point out that my looking at the details of the image of the hen with the ruffled feathers brought to my mind a succession of images that I took no interest in: images of, for example, the garden where the hen sat in the wind or of the house nearby. I would explain that I usually discovered each of the images that I needed for a piece of fiction while I stared in my mind at the details of a previously discovered image and looked out for the detail that winked at me. Soon after I had noticed the winking of the detail of the copper-orange hackles of the hen, for example, I had seen in my mind for the first time, so I believed, an image of an illustration in a book for children in which illustration a number of infant children were either dead or asleep or beneath the surface of a stream the water of which had been coloured an orange-gold colour by the artist.

  I would have been aware, as soon as I had used the word winking in my report of my means of discovering images, that one at least of you, my listeners, would have wanted me to explain further what exactly I saw when an image winked at me. And I would have been prepared to explain, when one of you questioned me after I had finished talking to you, that a detail of an image does not wink in quite the way a human being winks to another. The detail of an image, being almost always something other than a human face, has no eye with which to wink, and must signal to me by a sort of flickering or fluttering or nodding or trembling. Even so, I choose deliberately the word winking to describe this primitive signal to me from some patch of colour or some shape in my mind. I so choose, because my seeing the signal never fails to make me feel reassured and encouraged as many a person must feel after being winked at by another person. And I choose the word winking in this context because a wink from one person to another often signals that the two persons share a secret knowledge, so to speak, and I often feel, after some detail in my own mind has winked at me, that I have been shown proof that the farthest parts of my own mind are friendly towards me; that whatever may
be hidden in those far parts of my mind is willing to reveal itself to me; that all is well in what passes with me for the world.

  If I had tried to write in the air in front of you the beginnings of a piece of fiction, I might have gone on to report that the detail of the water in the stream where the children were asleep or dead would have caused me to see in my mind, and to prepare to write about, an image of a man lying just below the surface of a greenish wave as it broke about twenty metres from a beach in the southwest of Victoria a few years after the day when the wind ruffled the feathers of the hen with the one chicken. The man just mentioned was neither dead nor asleep but demonstrating to his children, who were standing in shallow water near the beach, that the human body is of its nature buoyant and that water need not be feared. And at about this point in my demonstration of my beginning a piece of fiction, I would have understood (and would have told you at once of my so understanding) that the title of the piece of fiction would probably be ‘King-in-the-Lake’. And if I had thought that the matter was not evident to you, I would have ended my demonstration by telling you that I have always considered titles important and have looked for the title of each of my pieces of fiction among the words relating to the most important of the images that gave rise to the piece.

  I read a little, many years ago, of the writings of C.G. Jung and Sigmund Freud but soon lost interest. I found the notion of an unconscious mind required of me the same sort of belief that I had formerly, as a church-going young person, been expected to place in angels and demons and the like. And no theoretical account of the personality has ever seemed to me as convincing as the demonstrations offered in fiction of even average quality of the infinite variability of humankind. In this, as in so many other matters, I have preferred to ponder particular instances rather than to consider general assumptions.

  I should add here that I have never been able to understand, much less believe in, any theory of the evolution of species. Such notions as that primitive organisms are capable of promoting their own interests, let alone the interests of their descendants – such notions seem to me even more far-fetched than anything in the Book of Genesis.

  I have never felt much interest in systems of mythology and have found tedious at best those works of literature the meaning of which derives from some personage or story or theme or motif in Greek or any other mythology. However, at some time around my fortieth year I began to understand that some of my own writing derived some of its meaning from details in a body of beliefs that might be called my own mythology or cosmology. If asked to defend this rather pompous-sounding claim, I might have to quote from or refer to some of my writings that are still unpublished and will remain so during my lifetime.

  I believe I may be unable to think abstract thoughts. I studied Philosophy One at the University of Melbourne in 1966, when I was aged twenty-seven, but after I had handed in my first written exercise I was taken aside by my tutor and told that I did not seem to understand what philosophy itself was.

  I have come to believe since that my tutor was right. Even so, I managed to obtain second-class honours in Philosophy One by being able to recall during examinations particular paragraphs from textbooks and particular comments from lecturers and tutors; to write summaries of what I remembered; and to write also a few comments that I imagined a person such as myself might have written during a philosophy examination if that person had understood what philosophy itself was.

  Later in my university course, I enrolled under a misapprehension in a certain unit and found myself studying in translation the works of the renowned Arab philosophers of the Middle Ages. I passed this unit by the same means that I had used to pass Philosophy One, but with the important difference that I discovered in the works of a philosopher whose name I have long since forgotten a statement that I not only seemed to understand but from which I drew a sort of inspiration as a writer of fiction. The statement was to the effect that everything exists in a state of potentiality; that is to say, anything can be said to have a possible existence.

  I am not unaware that my cherished fragment of philosophy may well have come originally from Greek philosophy or may be a commonplace of that philosophy. Many things that I cherish have found their way to me by winding, circuitous routes.

  A thing exists for me if I can see it in my mind, and a thing has meaning for me if I can see it in my mind as being connected to some other thing or things in my mind.

  In my view, the place we commonly call the real world is surrounded by vast and possibly infinite landscape which is invisible to these eyes (points to eyes) but which I am able to apprehend by other means. The more I tell you about this landscape, the more inclined you might be to call it my mind. I myself often call it my mind for the sake of convenience. For me, however, it is not just my mind but the only mind.

  Apart from what lies right now within the narrow range of these two eyes (points again to eyes), everything that I am aware of or have ever been aware of is somewhere in the far-reaching landscape of (my) mind. Of course, I acknowledge the existence of other minds, but such is my view of things that I can only see those minds and their contents as being located where all other imagined or remembered or desired entities are located – in the landscape of landscapes; in the place of places; in my mind.

  One piece of fiction always gives me a special satisfaction whenever I look back on it: ‘A Quieter Place than Clun’ in Landscape With Landscape. The narrator of that piece struggles for many years to have some of his writing published and, at the same time, to conceive of some coloured image or diagram that will fill a gap or void that he imagines within himself. He achieves only limited success in each enterprise. At the age of thirty-four, he has a story published in a small magazine; and he is somewhat content, as years pass, to think of road maps of Victoria or diagrams of Melbourne streets as emblems of his essential self. At the end of the piece of fiction, the character finds himself again confused; large areas of his mental landscape have been called into question; but if I know him, he will be able at last to correct his image of himself, perhaps in somewhat the way that a family might have introduced quarterings into its coat-of-arms during the course of its history.

  My feeling of satisfaction when I look at ‘A Quieter Place’ is wholly selfish. It may seem to you an unworthy sort of satisfaction; a perverted sort of satisfaction. I confess that I feel satisfied with my having achieved what the isolated and rather ineffectual character of my fiction had not achieved: I have achieved it by having had published the body of fiction of which ‘A Quieter Place’ is a part and by being sometimes able to see all that fiction as defining me in the way that the narrator of ‘A Quieter Place’ wanted to see himself defined. Yes, I sometimes have the experience of seeing my fiction as an emblem of myself or an heraldic device representing myself or even as a large part of myself. And I derive much satisfaction from so seeing.

  But what exactly do I see? I have sat just now for several minutes trying to answer that question. Sometimes while I sat, I seemed to be trying to see an image of every image in my writing – a fantastic chandelier of images: a gigantic three-dimensional mandala, or a ten-thousand-sided hologram of coloured scenery. But I could not hold this sort of image in my mind long enough to admire it. In the end, there occurred to me an emblematic scene, by which I mean a scene that might have been reported nowhere in my fiction but a scene that stands for the essence of that fiction.

  A man sits in a book-lined room in a house of many rooms. The window-blinds in the room are drawn, but the light at their edges tells me that the day outside is hot and bright. The silence in the room tells me that the house is surrounded by a wide and grassy and mostly level landscape. In the book-lined room, the sitting man sometimes reads and sometimes writes. What he mostly reads about or writes about is, perhaps, a woman or, perhaps, another wide and grassy and mostly level landscape further off from his own.

  I have sometimes asked myself the idle and fatuous questions what should I have d
one differently? or, what would I do differently, given a second chance? Of all the idle and fatuous answers that have occurred to me, the only answer that might interest you people is my declaring sometimes that I should have written all my fiction with no regard for the conventional terms novel or short story or novella but should have allowed each piece of my fiction to find its way to its natural end.

  I started out wanting to be a poet. I thought as a boy that the purpose of writing was to move people; to cause persons to feel more deeply. For most of my youth, the writing that moved me was poetry. I was often moved deeply by poetry. Among the first works of prose fiction that moved me deeply were Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, and it is by no means a coincidence that I first read these books, and several other books by Thomas Hardy, during the year when I began to think of writing prose fiction.

  I had another reason for wanting to be a poet. I believed for long that a writer of prose fiction had to have a deep understanding of other people and – more alarming still for me – had to be able to imagine or create believable characters. As someone who had been isolated during childhood and adolescence, who was preoccupied with his own moods and daydreams, and who was consistently baffled by the behaviour of other people, I thought I was qualified only to be a poet.

  However, I found poetry extremely hard to write for as long as I tried to write in rhymed, or even unrhymed, metrical lines. I found it somewhat easier to write what I believed was free verse, but I thought it was cheating to call such writing poetry. I began to write prose believing that I could express more freely in prose than in poetry what I wanted to express. However, I believed for several years that my prose would have more meaning if I allowed myself not to observe the conventions of English grammar. At about the time when I was writing the first drafts of the first pages of Tamarisk Row, I came to understand that I could never conceive of a network of meaning too complex to be expressed in a series of grammatical sentences. All of my published prose consists of grammatical sentences, although the second-last section of Tamarisk Row consists of four grammatical sentences interwoven. One of my greatest pleasures as a writer of prose fiction has been to discover continually the endlessly varying shapes that a sentence may take. I tried to teach my students to love the sentence. I sometimes suppose that the existence of the sentence bears witness to our need to make connections between things. I still sometimes think of trying again what I tried and failed to do as a young writer: to write a work of fiction consisting of one single grammatical sentence containing at least several thousand words.